The sapphire dog’s pets stared at him with the same inscrutable gaze the predator had given me.
“Very well,” Zahn said. “I will speak to underlings.” He walked up to a young woman in a long red coat, seemingly chosen at random. “I have sealed this town off from the rest of the world. Unless I lift this seal, no one will ever come here again, and no one but me will ever leave. You will be trapped—and starving—on a world teeming with food. Again.”
From somewhere behind me, Pastor Dolan said: “What do you want?”
Zahn turned toward Dolan. “I will take you from this place,” he said. “As my captive.”
Everyone who had a gun raised it in unison and began shooting at Zahn. The old man’s skull split open as a shotgun blast tore through it. He staggered, and bits of blood and flesh splashed off his body under the barrage. God, the sound was deafening.
Bullets ricocheted around us. One skipped off the floor near my hand, and Hondo collapsed heavily across my neck and shoulders.
The firing stopped after a few seconds. I glanced around the room. Six people lay dead or dying on the floor, and eight others were pressing their hands against bloody wounds. The nearest corpse had her face toward me. It was Karlene.
I had a sudden vision of her dog Chuckles, sitting on a blue tarp in the back of her truck. Was he still alive? If so, I hoped he’d find someone to care for him.
Someone behind me threw an empty nine-mil on the concrete floor. Preston’s shotgun and a pair of rifles were discarded, too. Obviously, they hadn’t brought enough spare ammunition.
The old man had fallen on his back into the corner. He raised his left arm and made a horrible choking sound. The woman in the long red coat lay on the floor beside him, a bright spray of arterial blood pulsing out of her thigh onto the wall. I shrugged Hondo’s body off me and got to my knees. Zahn was still making that
Then I realized he was laughing.
He sat up. Most of his head and face were gone, and his body was riddled with bloody exit and entrance wounds. His only good eye rolled in his head as he looked around the room.
He saw the bleeding woman beside him and lunged at her wound, ruined mouth gaping.
I shut my eyes. My stomach felt sour, and my skin crawled. I wanted to run for the door, but I could hear a couple of the pets nearby reloading. The sounds the old man was making were revolting. They weren’t the wet slurping noises you hear in a horror movie. They were the moans a connoisseur makes during a fine meal.
I couldn’t help myself. I looked at him again.
As he gulped down the blood, his wounds were healing, even the ones Annalise had given him.
The woman died before Zahn finished healing, so he started eating the meat.
“I don’t understand,” Pastor Dolan said, his voice flat and toneless. “Why didn’t you die?”
“Of course you don’t understand,” the old man said between bites. “This world is full of things you and your food do not understand. Chief among them is me. You can’t kill me with those guns, but they do hurt. If you hurt me again, I will leave you here to starve.”
“I don’t want to be captured again,” Dolan said. I didn’t want to look at him. I didn’t want to see the expression on his face. I also didn’t want to turn my back on Zahn.
“The people who held you captive before didn’t understand what you are. They would have fed you if they knew how, but they didn’t. I know more about you, and I can guarantee that you—and your new selves—will never starve again.”
New selves? That didn’t sound good.
“I don’t want to be captured again. I nearly starved to death the last time.” Pastor Dolan’s singsong voice sounded a little closer to me.
“You have been captured already,” Zahn said. “You and your food.”
“I know this. I tried to escape many times.”
“If you come away with me, I will see that you are fed. I don’t want to destroy you, like this one does.” He pointed at me. “I want to grow in power with you. Or you can starve here. The choice is yours.”
“I don’t really have a choice,” Pastor Dolan said. “Isn’t that right?”
The sapphire dog poked its head though the hole in the cinder block. Zahn looked at it and smiled. “It is right,” he said as he tore a long muscle out of the runner’s thigh. “You have belonged to me all along.” He stuffed the meat into his mouth, opening his jaws unnaturally wide to make it fit.
The sapphire dog stepped through the opening in the wall and curled up on the floor. Four of the uninjured townspeople moved in front of it, blocking my view. Damn. I was probably too far to use my ghost knife anyway.
Then Zahn turned his bloody face to me. He smiled in a way I didn’t like. “And now for you.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Without Hondo, the man holding me couldn’t keep me on the floor. He was strong, but I thrashed desperately. I knocked him down and moved away from the old man.
Unfortunately, the sapphire dog’s pets had clustered in front of the exit, blocking it with their bodies. If I ran that way, they could simply grab me and hold me for Zahn.
So I moved away from him in a direct line. I only managed a few steps before three or four others took hold of me. I struggled but couldn’t break free. My legs were kicked out from under me, and I fell to my knees again.
